McDivitt was also the commander of 1965′s Gemini 4 mission, where his best friend and colleague Ed White made the first U.S. spacewalk.
He passed on a chance to land on the moon and instead became the space agency’s program manager for five Apollo missions after the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Flying with Apollo 9 crewmates Rusty Schweickart and David Scott, McDivitt’s mission was the first in-space test of the lightweight lunar lander, nicknamed Spider. Their goal was to see if people could live in it, if it could dock in orbit and — something that became crucial in the Apollo 13 crisis — if the lunar module’s engines could control the stack of spacecraft, which included the command module Gumdrop.
McDivitt didn’t have money for college growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He worked for a year before going to junior college. When he joined the Air Force at 20, soon after the Korean War broke out, he had never been on an airplane. He was accepted for pilot training before he had ever been off the ground.McDivitt flew 145 combat missions in Korea and came back to Michigan where he graduated from the University of Michigan with an aeronautical engineering degree.
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Astronaut James McDivitt, Apollo 9 commander, dies at 93The NASA astronaut who commanded the Apollo 9 mission has died
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NASA Astronaut James McDivitt, Commander of 1969 Apollo 9 Mission, Dies at 93Unlike many of his fellow astronauts, James McDivitt didn’t yearn to fly from childhood. He was just good at it.
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Apollo 9 commander James McDivitt dies at 93The astronaut was also the commander of the Gemini 4 mission in 1965, when his best friend and colleague, Ed White, made the first U.S. spacewalk.
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